


strings

by actualmuseofspace



Series: one strand, a million plies [1]
Category: Gravity Falls
Genre: Alternate Universe - Different Powers, Canon Compliant, Gen, Non-Linear Narrative, Sweaters, Time Travel, Twins, i will cry the day i manage to produce something that follows a rational time line, kind of
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-06-23
Updated: 2018-06-23
Packaged: 2019-05-27 10:17:26
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,814
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15022448
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/actualmuseofspace/pseuds/actualmuseofspace
Summary: Mabel makes every sweater she wears before she needs it. Thus, she can draw two conclusions:The future, for the average person, is a mystery.The future is like a sweater. A sweater looks complex and like it must be made of a million parts, but it is really just one string.





	strings

**Author's Note:**

> All sweaters are made from one string. Some have seams, but even still, a careful tug will unwind the most of it.
> 
> Almost every string is made from plies - normally three or four - which twist together to make it stronger. Normally, you try to keep them together. Sometimes you want to seperate them.

"Dipper," says Mabel. "Would you go back, if you could?"

"Back to what?"

"I don't know. Some time before all of this."

"No, I don't think I would."

(Dipper, Mabel knows, faces a different future than her. One which he can change as long as he believes he can - as long as he acts in just the right way. For him, the future and the past are flexible things, under his control. Dipper, Mabel knows, can afford to not go back.)

\--

As teeangers, they are positive and negative nodes on batteries. Mabel looks back where Dipper looks forward.

"Think about college," he'll say, as she watches clouds. "What makes us stand out?"

"Think about who we were," she responds, ignoring the way he paces. "How did we become this?"

They can't answer their own questions, but they're twins because they can answer each others.

"We don't," she says. "But I promise it has a happy ending." Mabel may not know the details, but she knows what the truth sounds like.

"We made choices - or choices were made on us," he says, before she can correct him. "It doesn't matter, as long as we live, we change.." Dipper can play out a million alternaties, but he knows this was the best one without knowing what happens past today.

They complete a circuit, Mabel just doesn't know what it's feeding.

\--

When Mabel is seven, she realizes she can move with the world, or she can stand and let it move by her. She chooses the second, because even if she pretends to be moving with it, she'll always be waiting for it to catch up.

(This choice, she knows, like any other, has been made before she chooses it.)

She cuts her bangs with safety scissors and tries to be surprised when her hands still shake. She listens to her mother’s CDs and pretends she doesn’t know what the next track is. She traces her name in bubble letters over the front page of every notebook, and she ignores that when she closes her eyes, her hand keeps moving because it knows the shape already.

For Mabel, her future does not have to be any different from the present or the past. It all happens, it has all already happened. She might as well look to the past, because that's all that surprises her.

If she won't live through it, it can be unknown to her.

(Dipper watches her read books sideways or with holes cut in them, trying to find a way to be surprised by the ending. After each try, he tells her there is no way she can find the ending. She says, “I know, but I don’t have a choice.”)

When Mabel is seven, she chooses to live life the way it’ll surprise her the most, but there aren’t many surprises to be had.

\--

When her parents tell here they’re sending them away for the summer, Mabel lets her face go through shock and excitement just like she knows it must. They can’t tell the difference between emotion and what is practiced. They don’t know there’s a difference.

She fills her suitcases with yarn, there’s only barely enough room for her clothes.

“You don’t even know how to knit,” he protests.

“I do,” she says. “I have made forty.” She makes sure each ball is in a prime position for tangling before she zippers it shut.

“You could have,” he agrees.

“I didn’t want to, then. Did I?” Then she smiles, because she is supposed to. Dipper knows that this smile is just for that. He doesn't mind.

“No, no. You could have-” She doesn’t listen to what he says. She puts her fingers over her ears and doesn’t listen. She knew how this conversation ended, but she still wants to act it out when she living through it.

Dipper knows what that is, too.

\--

Dipper is scientific and must test to find the limits, and so he does with them. He keeps a notebook, tests himself first.

The time he spends seems to depend on the detail, he reports to her. If he wants to see the specifics, he must invest more. The number of realities he wants doesn't change anything.

He gives Mabel a stopwatch and makes her press and press again, and she always knows just when to do it. He makes observations and jots down things, changing the slightest of factors. He videos his face, and he studies it.

He goes back, and tries to find the best test to carry out. He comes out with a thousand ideas, but he never seems to get the answer he's looking for, so he moves onto her. He wants to know how far she can go, what she sees, how it works. He cannot sink his teeth any further into himself, so he turns it on her.

"It's the milestones," she says. "The week, the month - it's the big things." What's big to a seven year old is not the same as what's big to her at ten, so he comes back with the same experiment.

Nothing has changed.

He seems disappointed.

Her detail is equally uncontrollable - she sees maybe a flash of a symbol or maybe she can feel her own pulse.

"Can't you tell me what you're looking for? Maybe there's a trick, a pattern..."

"That's not how it works." She ties back her hair with the hair tie she had pretended to think to lose. "I just know what I know."

He keeps testing. She offers nothing conclusive. She knows he is going through every test, trying to find the one that was successful, the choices he could have made. He doesn't find anything, or if he does, he doesn’t tell her.

\--

She makes each sweater late at night. She sits on the couch and turns on the TV and focuses on each stitch. Sometimes, she can pretend that she does not know how the TV show will end when she focuses on if she will drop the next stitch.

Grunkle Stan comes down to the armchair. He doesn’t like her choice of TV shows, they tend to be things he’s seen before. (She needs them to be before she was born, because that’s the only way she has a chance at getting to experience them.)

She lets her needles click because she knows he will notice. She does this not because she has to, but because she wants to, and she already has.

He watches each stitch.

“Why this?” he’ll ask as she makes a new pattern. “Why so many colors?”

“I like them,” she says, and he nods like there’s something else underneath it.

\--

She's not fooled by a promise of an endless summer. Mabel knows how this ends. She's not fooled, but she knows how it must end, so she pretends she is.

In the bubble, she is offered a chance at choice. Here, where nothing moves as it should, nothing can be predicted. She doesn't have to close her eyes. She can watch, open, as what she says comes true, not because she knows it will, but because she wants it to.

Dipper, she thinks, must always feel like this.

The feeling is intoxicating and disorienting. Her strings have been cut and if she did not know how to play what she is supposed to, she would fall to the ground in a slump. It's liberating and terrifying.

She says things; she wants things; she dreams her summer could last forever.

She knows how it will end. She knows what has to happen. Right here, though, she thinks she has an eternity to pretend she doesn't, in a way where she thinks she could make it.

(Mabel knows how it will end and she knows she can’t change it and she knows that she could, if she wanted to.)

Dipper finds her, because Dipper will always find her.

He says, "Mabel, it's time to go."

"No," she says. "I would know if it was time." She thought she was good at this. At playing pretend.

She can't be good, though, because for the first time in her life, her brother doesn't trust her when she says the time hasn't come yet. She can't be good, because he doesn't let her make a choice.

She can't be hurt, she can't be upset. She's only just learning to make her choices. She barely knows what to do with them.

\--

Ford seems not to notice her sweaters. He's up just as late as Grunkle Stan and Mabel, but he never says anything. Mabel thinks this is how it's supposed to be, but everything around Ford is a blindspot.

Mabel can't see everything. She can see what is about to happen. She can see most of her own life. But distance futures, though solid, are often hard to place. The end of the summer is clear from the beginning, although the middle bits might be partially unknown.

Ford has been a blindspot. She has known someone was coming, but it was only until just before that she learned who.

He doesn't notice her sweaters. He does not seem to hear when she offers to make him one. She can tell she has more yarn than sweaters left to make.

It seems he must have a blindspot, too.

Instead, he calls out to Dipper. Dipper, who has seen too much loss to let an opportunity go, Dipper, who does not know what they will find before they have found it, Dipper, who believes in being prepared, because he does not know what to prepare for.

Maybe, Mabel dares to think, it's just that Dipper is better for somethings. It's better, isn't it, to have someone who will learn from his mistakes? Mabel's mistakes are already made. There is no point in avoiding them, or remembering them.

Still, Grunkle Stan watches her make sweaters and asks her how she knows the pattern. Is it so hard to believe Ford could do the same?

Mabel is bright, too bright to ignore. She has felt the sting of rejection in a million ways, those she has seen and those she has lived, but this is not that. This is a blindspot for the both of them.

If you have nothing to surprise you, you have little unknown. Mabel, now faced with a mystery she knows she will not solve, tries to pretend it doesn't bother her. She's had plenty of practice.

She chases each future but she knows there is only one, every sweater is made from one string, and so the world must be.

\--

"I'm sorry," she says on their third night, at their ceiling that she hasn't found the posters to hang on it yet. "I'm sorry."

"Sorry for what, Mabel?"

"Nothing, Dipper. Everything. Don't worry, go to sleep."

(Dipper doesn't need to comment on this in the morning.)

**Author's Note:**

> Thanks for reading! If you didn't pick up on it, Stan and Ford have the same general powers as Dipper and Mabel, although it is slightly different. I have two fics in the same universe planned ("sometime before all of this," about Dipper's relationship to the past and "sand to glass," about what happened when Ford comes back), but I don't have a timeline for that yet.
> 
> My next planned fic is still "before the dragons," a Harry Potter fic about Cedric and Harry, for October eighth, but, clearly, plans can be interrupted.


End file.
